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Instapaper is joining Pinterest

blog.instapaper.com

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Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#141

Post by fraXis »

cvburgess wrote: post #90
brians wrote: post #15

Bummer. I love and use instapaper, gathering articles for a few weeks to read at altitude. It's a great product, and I paid for a subscription these last years in the hopes that I could therefore continue to enjoy it. Now it's sold to Pinterest, one of the two sites I don't bother with links to—because I know Pinterest and Quora will require me to sign in rather than show me what they showed a search engine. What els…

I really like http://raindrop.io - its pretty, easy, and has a mobile app / chrome extension.

I second raindrop.io.

I have been using it for three months now, and it works flawlessly. I was using Pocket, but sometimes after I would save links with their iPhone app, I would go into their web interface to view them at a later time, and those links would be gone.

But I have not had one single link disappear from raindrop.io since I have been using it.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#142

Post by freehunter »

pcl wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mobile Safari on iOS but Chrome on macOS. This means that, as much as I love Safari's Reading List, it's basically "unavailable" to me on the desktop. To put something in the Reading List from Chrome, I have to focus the URL bar, copy the URL, open Safari, paste and go to the URL, and then ⌘⇧D to put it in the list. (I can also right-click on the URL bar in Chrome and use the "Add to Reading List" OS Service, b…

I've recently switched my primary browsing back to Safari on my 2012-era MacBook Air. Battery life is noticeably better. I still launch Chrome and FF regularly for development, but my tab-hell lives in Safari now.

Oh man other browsers kill the battery compared to Safari. It's not even a comparison.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#144

Post by herval »

idlewords wrote: post #99
bthdonohue wrote: post #96

Hi all, Brian from Instapaper here. There seem to be a number of comments expressing concerns about the acquisition, and I wanted to just jump in and offer to answer any questions you have about the acquisition. Based on the comments I've read below the main concerns seem to be that Instapaper will either be shutdown or materially changed in a way that effects the end-user experience. I can tell you that neither of t…

Delighted competitor here. How do you force your entire staff to relocate across the country without "materially changing the end-user experience"?

May I hijack this thread and ask why moving to SF at all? Was it part of the deal? Would you have moved despite the acquisition? Is there any specific things Instapaper was missing out by not being in bay area?

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#145

Post by mikeevans »

brians wrote: post #15

Bummer. I love and use instapaper, gathering articles for a few weeks to read at altitude. It's a great product, and I paid for a subscription these last years in the hopes that I could therefore continue to enjoy it. Now it's sold to Pinterest, one of the two sites I don't bother with links to—because I know Pinterest and Quora will require me to sign in rather than show me what they showed a search engine. What els…

ReadItLater became Pocket, I think.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#146

Post by stonogo »

bthdonohue wrote: post #96

Hi all, Brian from Instapaper here. There seem to be a number of comments expressing concerns about the acquisition, and I wanted to just jump in and offer to answer any questions you have about the acquisition. Based on the comments I've read below the main concerns seem to be that Instapaper will either be shutdown or materially changed in a way that effects the end-user experience. I can tell you that neither of t…

Ah, no material changes to the end-user experience, just a shitload of backend personal-data shuttling.

Abhorrent.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#147

Post by bthdonohue »

herval wrote: post #144
idlewords wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delighted competitor here. How do you force your entire staff to relocate across the country without "materially changing the end-user experience"?

May I hijack this thread and ask why moving to SF at all? Was it part of the deal? Would you have moved despite the acquisition? Is there any specific things Instapaper was missing out by not being in bay area?

The core engineering team for Pinterest is out of SF and the team was open to moving to SF as part of the acquisition. Given that the company was majority-owned by betaworks (based out of NYC), it's unlikely we would've moved outside of the acquisition.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#148

Post by bthdonohue »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #137
bthdonohue wrote: post #96

Hi all, Brian from Instapaper here. There seem to be a number of comments expressing concerns about the acquisition, and I wanted to just jump in and offer to answer any questions you have about the acquisition. Based on the comments I've read below the main concerns seem to be that Instapaper will either be shutdown or materially changed in a way that effects the end-user experience. I can tell you that neither of t…

> Based on the comments I've read below the main concerns seem to be that Instapaper will either be shutdown or materially changed in a way that effects the end-user experience. I can tell you that neither of those are the plan for the short-term or long-term of the product, and I am personally looking forward to providing you with the same great service under a new owner. As a person who has been part of a small com…

I appreciate the congratulations. I do understand that plans change, and all I can say is that I will be doing everything to make sure we offer the same great product and service at Pinterest.

Re: Instapaper is joining Pinterest

#149

Post by derefr »

jonknee wrote: post #109
derefr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about bypassing security? I was presuming the extension would just "walk in the front door" by getting the user to log into it with their iCloud credentials, and then passing those to the server. Or are you saying that the iCloud protocols are obfuscated/DRMed above-and-beyond just having regular AAA constraints applied to them?

iCloud is not a free for all, it's meant to share data within your app or within your org's group of apps (e.g. all Google apps). The Reading List data is within Apple's own container and you would not have access to it through conventional tools. This is typically a good thing because syncing is hard enough when you control both ends, having arbitrary programs messing with your data is a recipe for disaster.

Ah, this is what had me confused: I was assuming that the parts of "iCloud" that preceded the creation of the Ubiquity sync protocol (e.g. Safari bookmark sync, Notes and Reminders, Calendars, etc.) just stayed WebDAV-based with their CoreData databases being purely local+ephemeral, rather than migrating over into using full-on Ubiquity-synced CoreData stores. (I swear you can still export e.g. CalDAV calendar URLs from Calendars.app for iCloud calendars, and these CalDAV resources are writable if you want them to be. Or am I misremembering?)

Still, even with the way iCloud works, you don't need to directly prod the data. If you want to manipulate Safari's container, you can prod Safari itself into doing so. OSA is no COM, but it works just fine for this sort of thing. (And if you can't manage to make it do so, you can write a Safari plug-in presenting a locally-bound HTTP API that the Chrome extension can talk to.)

Now, the real challenge would be doing this syncing as part of some "syncing service" running on a cloud VM somewhere, that doesn't actually want to run thousands of headless copies of Safari. That's what I really want: the ability to sync Chrome with iCloud even if I currently have no active iCloud-attached devices. Probably the simplest way to do this is to write your own Ubiquity+CoreData client libraries and present yourself as another device that wants to sync against the iCloud account. It'd be up to you from there to safely munge the CoreData object hierarchy in a way resembling the official clients, but at least you'd be able to linearize those updates against iCloud messages.

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